From InfoWorld: Mozilla has submitted a proposal to the the Khronos Group, the stewards of the OpenGL and the more recent Vulkan graphics APIs, for a next-generation web graphics API it calls Obsidian.
This submission comes a month after Apple submitted its proposal for WebGPU, a similar project that it intends to prototype directly into the WebKit browser project.
If Mozilla’s idea accrues interest, it could set the stage for a clash over the future of web graphics between two standards-setting bodies, one that oversees the web generally and another that governs cross-platform graphics APIs.
WebGL, the current standard for rendering graphics on the web, has been ripe for a successor that better exploits recent advances in GPUs. Khronos has been talking up the need for a unified, next-generation graphics API that transcends platforms and recently provided a GitHub repository where one could submit proposals for a WebGL standard that meets those criteria.
The draft proposal for Obsidian is exactly that: a draft that spells out high-level concepts for a graphics API that’s “designed for WebAssembly, modern GPUs, and multithreaded environment[s],” and that “provides [the] maximum feature set of the GPU to the web applications.”
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